Tufte, Poetry, and 1+1 = Me?

Like many people in the class, I too had a positive reaction to Tufte’s text Envisioning Information and all of the wonderful pictorial examples that he provided. Although there were several things that I found intriguing, his discussion on “Laying and Separation” seemed particularly interesting. The passage that really stands out to me from that section is when Tufte describes the “Visual activation of negative areas of white space… (and) the endlessly contextual and interactive nature of visual elements…[embodied]…in the fundamental principle of information design: 1 + 1 = 3 or more” (61). It never completely dawned on me until after reading Tufte, but this idea of white space creating a “third visual activity” permeates every possible visual medium (I guess that’s why he refers to it as a “fundamental principle”). Aside from examples that I have seen in advertising (such as the “hidden” arrow in the FedEx logo), I began to think about poetic forms like concrete poetry (a good example being Gregory Corso’s “Bomb” or anything by e.e. cummings), how the use of text in some places and the absence of text in others can create either an astounding visual effect that often mirrors what is being discussed in the poem, or a “…surplus (of)…non-information, noise, and clutter” (61). Personally, it’s been a struggle for me to move my verse around the page (first, transitioning from the center – the place where we all put our crappy, sappy high school poetry – to the left side of the page, and now from the left side to, well, anywhere else). I’m not exactly sure why this is. Any other creative writers have similar experiences?